Jan his heart Mark Twain must have realized that essentially he was a man feeling, too sensitive to serve merely as a comedian, too undisciplined to philosopher he sometimes fancied himself. His forte was to recapture "his sheer joy of living, when to be young was very heaven. A great river flowing through the wilderness set the stage for a boy's own dream of selfefficiency, of being a new Robinson Crusoe on Jackson's Island. In the background moved the pageantry of life, colored by humor, make-believe, and melodrama; but the complexity of the machine age and the city lay far, far away.
Mark Twain did not write his first books about this dream world, but let he haze of ideality collect about it, reserving it luckily for the high noon of his powers. Apparently the first hint oЈ this motif comes in one of his New ' York letters to the Alta California, in the spring of 1867, in which he happens to recall the town drunkard of Hannibal, Jimmy Finn (destined to return as Huck's father), and also the Cadets of Temperance which Sam Clemens joined in order to march in funeral processions wearing their red scarf. This latter incident crops up in Tom Sawyer. Shortly afterward in The Innocents, among the pleasures and palaces of Europe, Twain interpolated other boyhood memories. In February, 1870, on receiving a letter from his "first, and oldest and dearest friend" Will Bowen, one of the flesh-and-blood components of Tom Sawyer, he sat down under the spell of the past and wrote a reply calling up some eight scenes which later appear in Tom Sawyer and Hackle-berry Finn. Around this time he wrote a nameless sketch about a romantic lovesick swain who beyond question is Tom Sawyer. Designated as "Boy's Manuscript" by Twain's first editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, it was not pub-lished until 1942 in Bernard De Veto's Mark Twain at Wolf. Some four years later Twain made a fresh start, scrapping the earlier diary form in favor of third-person narrative. By midsummer, 1875, it was done, and off the press late in the next year (a few months after Clemens with his usual inconsistency had written Will Bowen a stern letter on August 31, 1876, bidding him dwell no more in the sentimental never-never land of boyhood, denying that the past holds anything "worth pickling for present or future use"). In this latter year Twain began Huckleberry Finn as a sequel, laid it aside during six years, went back to the story after his visit to Hannibal in 1882, and bushed it a little over two years later.
The first reader of Tom Sawyer, William Dean Howells, disagreed with the author that he had written a book for adults only. He quickly persuaded twain that it was primarily a story for boys, which would gad over their shoulder. Twain therefore withdrew a few gibes against Sunday schools and turned several phrases that smacked of backwoods frank-ness. Nothing of importance, however, was altered, nor did Tom suffer from transformation into the neat, obedient paragon which fiction for the so long had held up to their resentful gaze. The first chapter announces the Tom "was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy well though -- and loathed him." The only resemblance Tom bears to t-K fictional creations of his time is in sensibility: he yields to self-pity relish every neighborhood tear shed over his supposed drowning, and almost fail upon hearing that even a villain like Injun Joe has been sealed in the ca Otherwise, our hero is of very different mettle. He steals from and Aunt Folly luxuriates in idleness, missives in church, huffs and like his friend Huck employs lying as protective coloration in a world of adult tyrants. Consequently, in some American homes the new book was read by grown-ups, then tucked away out of a boy's reach; its successor Huckleberry Finn, soon after publication was ejected from the town library of Concord, Massachusetts (where, a generation before, John Brown had been welcomed by Thoreau and Emerson), because Huck elected to "go to Hell" rather than betray his friend, a runaway Negro.
In 1870 Thomas Bailey Aldrich had published his mild Story of a Bad Boy; Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court M. Drofa 2003 p.134, 163, 222, 267 twenty years later Twain's friend Hovels would reminisce of adolescents not too bright or good for human nature's daily food in A Boy's Town; a little later came Stephen Crane's recollections of Whilom Ville and William Alien White's of Bayville. They helped maintain the tradition of realism. In extreme recoil from priggishness, a line beginning with Peck's Bad Boy in 1883 flaunted incorrigibility above all. It is possible to overstress the picaresque intent of Tom Sawyer in turning upside down the world of Peter Parley and the Rolla books, or its analogues with that still greater novel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, in which some critics find the model of Tom the dreamer and Huck his commonsense henchman. Mark Twain's verisimilitude should not be overlooked in this search for "purpose." He wrote about boys from having been one in the Gilded Age, in a river town before the war.
To a stranger in 1887 he described this book as "simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." These lads no more resemble Peck's Bad Boy than they do the model children of that improving story-teller, Jacob Abbott. Within a framework of superb dialogue and setting, of sensitive perceptions that turn now and again into poetry, against a background where flicker shadows of adult humanitarianism and irony, Tom and Huck grow visibly as we follow them. The pranks and make-believe of early chapters-whitewashing the fence, releasing a pinch bug in church, playing pirate in Tom Sawyer, and in its sequel the rout of a Sunday school picnic under the guise of attacking a desert caravan -- are dimmed as the human values deepen and occasional moral issues appear. The Tom who takes Becky's punishment in school, and testifies for the innocent Muff Potter at risk of the murderer revenge, parallels the development of Huck from a happy-golucky gamine epitome of generosity and loyalty.
6.2 “Huckleberry Finn” as the most significant work
Mark Twain makes no account of consistencies in time. His boys vary between the attitudes of nine-year-ids and those of thirteen or fourteen, despite the fact that Tom Sawyer 's time is one Missouri summer, and that of Huckleberry Finn a few more broken months. Like the creator of perennial comic-strip characters, Twain syncopates the march of time as he pleases. In the latter novel he also ignores the fact that Nigger Jim could have escaped by swimming across to the free soil of Illinois early in the book, and commits other sins against literalism which he would have ridiculed unmercifully in the pages of his noire James Fennimore Cooper.
Huckleberry Finn is clearly the finer book, showing a more mature point of view and exploring richer strata of human experience. A joy forever, it is unquestionably one of the masterpieces of American and of world literature. Here Twain returned to his first idea of having the chief actor tell the story, with better results. Huck's speech is saltier than Tom's, his mind freer from the claptrap of romance and sophistication. Huck is poised midway between the town-bred Tom and that scion of wood lore and primitive superstition Nigger Jim, toward whom Huck with his margin of superior worldliness stands in somewhat the same relation that Tom stands toward Huck. When Tom and Huck are together, our sympathy turns invariably toward the latter. A homeless river rat, cheerful in his rags, suspicious of every attempt to civilize him, Huck has none of the unimportant virtues and all the essential ones. The school of hard knocks has taught him skepticism, horse sense, and a tenacious grasp on reality. But it has not toughened him into cynicism or crime. Nature gave him a stanch and faithful heart, friendly to all underdogs and instantly hostile toward bullies and all shapes of overmastering power. One critic has called him the type of the common folk, sample of the run-of-the-mill democracy in America. Twain himself might have objected to the label, for him once declared "there are no common people, except m the highest spheres of society." Huck always displays frontier neighborliness, even trying to provide a rescue for three murderers dying marooned on a wrecked boat, because "there isn't no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself, yet, and then how would I like it?" Money does not tempt him to betray his friend Nigger Jim, though at times his conscience is troubled by the voice of convention, preaching the sacredness of property -- in the guise of flesh and blood -- and he trembles on the brink of sur-render. Nor can he resist sometimes the provocation offered by Jim's innocent sedulity, only to be cut to the quick when his friend bears with dignity the skivers that his trustfulness has been made game of. Even as Huck surpasses Tom in qualities of courage and heart, so Nigger Jim excels even
Huck in fidelity and innate manliness, to emerge as the book's character.
Sam Clemens himself (who in the first known letter he wrote his on the day he reached New York in August, 1853, Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court M. Drofa 2003 p.134, 163, 222, 267 had indulged the sarcasm, "I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern Stat niggers are considerably better than white people") learned in time, much Huck learns, to face down his condescension. In later years he became warm friend of the Negro and his rights. He paid the way of a near student through Yale as "his part of the reparation due from every white t every black man," and savagely attacked King Leopold of Belgium for the barbarities of his agents in the Congo. Mrs. Clemens once suggested as a mollifying rule to her husband, "Consider everybody colored till he is proved white." Howells thought that as time went on Clemens the South westerner was prone to lose his Southern but cleave to his Western heritage, finding his real affinities with the broader democracy of the frontier. On other issues of race prejudice, Twain looked upon the Jew with unqualified admiration defended the Chinese whom he had seen pelted through the streets of San Francisco, and confessed to only one invincible antipathy, namely, against the French--although his most rhapsodic book was written in praise of their national heroine.
The final draft of Huckleberry Finn was intimately bound up with the writing of Twain's third great volume about his river days, Life on the Mississippi. Fourteen chapters of these recollections had been published in the Atlantic in 1875; before expanding them into a book Twain made a memorable trip in 1882 back to the scenes of his youth. In working more or less simultaneously on both long-unfinished books, he lifted a scene intended for Huckleberry Finn--about Huck and the craftsmen--to flavor the other book, but the great gainer from his trip was not the memoir but the novel. The relative pallor of Life on the Mississippi, Part II, is due in a measure to the fact that so much lifeblood of reminiscence is drained off into the veins of Huckleberry Finn. The travel notes of 1882, written up soon after Twain s return home, are suffused with some of the finest situations in his novel: the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, Colonel Sherborn and the mob, and the two seedy vagabonds who come on-stage as the Duke and the King, with a posse in their wake, who "said they hadn't been doing nothing, and was being chased for it."
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